Even this basketball agnostic enjoyed the syrupy-slick razzmatazz of the NBA’s annual trip to London, but while the contest between the New York Knicks and Milwaukee Bucks was a blowout, the battle to win hearts and minds in Britain strums on. Last week Adam Silver, the NBA’s commissioner, put it bluntly. Basketball’s goal, he said, was to be the No2 sport in the UK.

Number two sport! That will be greeted with scepticism by Britain’s many basketball refuseniks, whose fingers-in-ears attitude is not dissimilar to those Americans who used to sneer that soccer would never get a foothold in the US. After all, we have been here before. In the early 80s, when Channel 4 broadcast the sport on Mondays; in the 90s when ITV showed the NBA and Sky had comprehensive coverage of British basketball; and again when London won the right to host the Olympics.

But the NBA, which now has 60 employees in London, is serious. And the fact that 20,000 seats for the Knicks v Bucks game went in under an hour – the fastest ever UK sell-out – hints they are making headway, even if the low numbers of satellite TV viewers and unspectacular crowds for the British Basketball League suggest there is some way to go.

Yet judging basketball’s impact solely on the basis of audience figures is surely incomplete. Especially given the interesting developments bubbling underneath the surface. According to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, for instance, basketball is now the second most popular sport played in the UK by 11- to 15-year-olds, with 32% of children playing (only football – with 54% – was more popular). Meanwhile, a Sport England Active People study highlighted that 52% of the 155,000 people over 16 that play basketball every week were of black or ethnic minority (BME) origin, the highest of any team sport. Cricket, incidentally, was the second on 29%.

That comes as no surprise to Nhamo Shire, who set up the Reach & Teach network to take the sport into deprived inner-city estates in London. His approach was simple: put on free basketball lessons while also training local people to become coaches to ensure the project was sustainable. Shire told me Reach & Teach has led to 6,500 people playing regularly and nearly 150 coaches being trained. Gangs don’t sabotage the sessions, he says, because in inner-city communities “basketball is sacred among the youth”.

Then there is José Martin, a 38-year-old from Spain, who set up the Love Basketball academy for women in September 2013 because he couldn’t find anywhere for his daughters to play. In just 16 months it has become the biggest women’s basketball club in London with seven teams, helped by Martin’s enthusiasm and willingness to go into local schools to coach free sessions.

Both Shire and Martin want to do more. Last year, MPs on the Basketball All-Parliamentary Group heard that every £1 invested in Reach & Teach brought £8 of social benefits. Funding from Sport England has allowed Shire to expand in London but he would love to go national. Meanwhile Martin relates his struggles to find courts in leisure centres and schools, which are often taken up by Zumba, badminton or five-a-side, and his battles with council red tape. Undeterred he wants to build a women’s basketball centre in London; next month he gets the chance to bend the ear of the sports minister, Helen Grant.

You hear dozens of similar stories. The brilliant work of the Brixton Topcats, which also produced the NBA star Luol Deng; the “carry a basketball not a blade” campaign in Newham; or Hoops4Health, which has benefited 80,000 youngsters in the north-east since 2002.

All sports dangle the possibility that they can change lives, of course, but as a recent report from the Basketball All-Party Parliamentary Group highlighted, basketball has greater success in disadvantaged areas because it has “huge street credibility”, “can be played with very little equipment”, and “almost all the top players [are] from deprived communities”.

But its chair, Sharon Hodgson, the shadow women and equalities minister, believes “the potential that basketball has to change many more lives is not being tapped into by government” and insists the sport is also “vastly underfunded compared to other sports helped by Sport England”.

In riposte, Sport England points out it will give £9m to basketball from 2013-17 and also stepped in to give Britain’s elite teams £1.18m after UK Sport withdrew its £7m funding because it felt they had little chance of winning medals at Rio 2016 or Tokyo 2020.

This, of course, steers us into that perennial debate about whether it is right that smaller Olympic sports played by comparatively few people are funded by UK Sport, while popular team sports, such as basketball, are not. And whether some of the funding that helped Britain win 19 medals in rowing, equestrian and sailing at London 2012 might have created a greater legacy if it had been used to build more sports centres or got more young people into sport?

Whatever your view, a common refrain from those involved in basketball’s grass roots is that the sport in Britain has a growing market and momentum, but desperately lacks the facilities to allow it to build. Momentum is one thing; the question now is what, if anything, will be different this time round?